The following article was published on
"Il Giornale" (a tautologically named right-wing newspaper owned by the
Berlusconi family) last saturday, March 31, 2001.
It is a classic example of MinCulPop-like
disinformation (the Ministero della Cultura Popolare administered censorship
and propaganda back in the 1930's, under the fascist regime): a bundle
of de-contextualized phrases mixed with fibs and lies, linked by a few
stratagems and tricks in an alternation of mockery and criminalization
(that is, underestimation and overestimation of the targeted foe).
The non-event took place in Perugia, Central
Italy. The pseudo-news bounced on to the local press in the following days.
According to some rumors, the Procura [District Attorney office] of Perugia
has regarded Chiocci's article as a "notitia criminis" [notice of crime]
and started an inquiry.
Here's the piece appended with our annotations.
-----------------------
"Il Giornale", March 31 2001, saturday, frontpage:
PERUGIA: HATE LECTURE
AT THE UNIVERSITY
"If the Pole [1] Wins,
It Will Be Time to Shoot!"
by Francobaldo Chiocci, inside, p.18
[p.18:]
4.00 PM, HATE LECTURE: "DO LIKE ME,
SHOOT THE NEW FASCISTS"
Former Vietnam Volunteer Speaks at
the University of Perugia:
"I have killed many bastards, I considered
it a good deed."
Two students send a tape to the District
Attorney
by Francobaldo Chiocci from Perugia
H. 4.00 pm: hate lecture in Room no.2 of
the faculty of Political Sciences, University of Perugia, where the great
jurists Baldo degli Ubaldi and Bartolo da Sassoferrato taught centuries
ago. Today the teacher is Vitaliano Ravagli, 67, also known as "the Vietcong
from Romagna", for he fought in Indochina in 1956. Albeit short (only 12
minutes) [2], it is an instructive lesson, useful to understand that "when
a communist can't stand it anymore" and "needs to kill somebody", he does
"what a communist gotta do", that is: take the gun and shoot, like Ravagli
himself did. It happened during and after the civil war and it will happen
again "if those bastards take over", then the imperative is still: "Shoot
them up!".
This instigation was the other day. So
far, nobody has expressed any indignation, except two "clandestine" non-leftist
students who have recorded a tape and will give it to the district attorney
[3]. Vitaliano Ravagli was the second speaker [4] and rambled about homicide
in a manic, obsessive but lucid way, which made the students of "L'Altrasinistra"
[The Other Left] group applaude. It was this group that organized the conference
and titled it "Axes of War to unbury"[5] after the book of Wu-Ming (in
chinese: nameless writers)[6].
Ravagli started to kill fascists (or presumed
fascists) when he was a boy, in 1954 [7]. Unlike his older brother, he
couldn't have killed them in the Resistance, thus he had to do it ten years
later. He began his oration by describing the poverty and pain of his family,
including supposed vexations they suffered in a concentration camp [8]
owing to the priests, nay, "the goddamn black cassocks", "those dirty pigs
didn't feed us 'cause they sold the food on the black market". He still
has "a lump in the throat" because he didn't make them pay for it.
The rest of the introduction is dedicated
to the justification of Tito's *foibe* massacres [9]: "That's what I did
myself: when we captured those who had raped and murdered, I'd point the
gun to their head and blow their brains away. I don't repent having done
it." Now he praises the via Rasella bomb attack [10], though "Had I been
the artificer, the bomb would've erased all the Germans of the Bozen Battalion.
Instead of a hand-cart, the partisans should've used three". Who cares
if the victims of the Nazi retaliation at the Ardeatine would have tripled?
Then he talks about his actions as an
executioner of fascists during the Fifties [11]. He admits, nay, he is
proud: "I killed some of them, and I have never felt guilty. Indeed, I
feel they were good deeds. If you find rotten apples in the basket, you
gotta take them away. At a certain point in my life I felt I needed to
kill. I met a person who told me: see, there's one guy named. ((the name
is incomprehensible, E.N.))[12], he and his buddies can enjoy life even
though they committed gruesome crimes. I did know it, all my brother's
friends had been murdered. Yeah, I killed some of them, but I can't reveal
their names. Nobody ever found their bodies, I did a clean job and put
two metres of soil over them. I know I shouldn't say this, I could end
up in jail. However, when I heard that in Indochina the poor were even
poorer than me, I decided to enlist. Down there, I did all that a communist
fighter must do, I fought till the end and took no prisoners. We weren't
as bad as they were. I killed many men."
In the rambling, also a rhetoric question:
"Have I done right? Have I done wrong? I don't repent, and yet I feel sorry
that the poor are forced to fight with each other. But what could I do?
Now, wait 'til they come back and become." What they're supposed to become
is incomprehensible, but I can grasp the rest: "Of course there isn't that
hatred anynmore, the kind of 'treatment' they gave my father in 1922. Nowadays
they've got other techniques. Soon you will understand that one can't keep
silent forever, comes a day you can't stand it anymore and take the gun.
You should see how fearful they get when they realize you've got guts and
nothing to lose. We fought for our ideals, they fought for money. You should
see how tame they get!". Eventually, the incitement: "Shoot 'em up at first
sight, they're dirty bastards and they're gonna take over again."
--------------------
Footnotes:
1- The Pole (aka Casa delle Liberta', House of Freedom) is the centre-right coalition led by Silvio Berlusconi. It is composed of several parties, including Alleanza Nazionale, the former neo-fascists who pretend to have cleaned their act.
2. The discussion on our novel "Asce di guerra" lasted nearly three hours, Vitaliano spoke several times on different subjects. It is clear since the beginning that the journalist has listened either to an extract or an edited version, or he's listened to the whole tape but purposefully leaves out the other 170 minutes, that is the context where the following things were said.
3. A few minutes before we started speaking, we were informed that three activists of the right-wing group Azione Giovani were in the audience, thus they were not "clandestine". Don't you find them pathetic, these kids playing the secret agent game?
4. Actually Vitaliano was the *fifth* to speak, after two introductive speeches by L'Altrasinistra and the speeches by Wu Ming Yi and Wu Ming Liang. It is worth noticing that the article gives the impression Vitalian was alone beside a mysterious "first speaker".
5. The actual title of the conference was "Resistance, Literature and Historical Revisionism". Most clearly, the "axes of war to unbury" are *the stories*, which readers of the book are perfectly aware of. This distorsion may seem insignificant, yet it aims at casting quite a different light on the meeting and discrediting the people who organized it.
6. Yeah? And who are supposed to be these people? Not a word on them (i.e. us). Again, it looks like sloppiness, but it is another intentional omission.
7. This assertion has no relationship with anything Vitaliano said in Perugia or wrote in the book. It is nothing other than a lie.
8. This is described in chapter 9 of *Asce di guerra*, a chapter named "Profughi" {Refugees]. It was an Allied camp for refugees managed by nuns. Both in the book and the conference, Vitaliano compared it to a real concentration camp because of the hard conditions which his family had to live in. Again, it looks like Chiocci doesn't have a clue of what he's describing, yet it is just a stratagem aimed at rendering Vitaliano ridiculous.
9. The "foibe" are big, deep holes in the ground located in the regions crossed by the Italian-Yugoslavian border. During WW2 and the Resistance, the Slovenian partisans *in-foibed* the bodies of many Italian fascists, spies and collaborationists. For years the Italian right-wing has described those executions as racially biased, turning things upside down. In Perugia we talked a lot about the foibe, and didn't say anything different from this: "When someone recalls those facts and puts the blame on Tito's partisan movement, we should remember the causes: in Venezia Giulia the fascists imposed a violent 'italianization' of the Slavs. Later, in April 1941 Italy invaded Yugoslavia and exported fascist violence in those territories. If we do not mention this, it will be impossible to understand the mass reactions in Istria in 1943 and 1945 [.] After the Armistice that area was annected to the Third Reich. In such a situation, many Italians collaborated with the Germans against the Slavs and the Partisans [.] Among the victims in the foibe were some innocent people, but the majority were responsible for massacres of Slavs and antifascists. If we do not draw a distinction between these two kinds of victims, we will end up charging their executioners with anti-Italian hatred, which provokes serious political consequences. It is undeniable the Right's will to omit that those 'martyrs' had belonged to the Italian forces of repression and then had placed themselves at the Nazis' disposal." (the historian Enzo Collotti interviewed on "Il Manifesto" newspaper, April 15, 2000)
10. On March 23, 1944, the GAP [Gruppi di Azione Partigiana] put a bomb in a hand-cart in via Rasella, Rome, and make it blow up as a Nazi column passed. Thirty nazis died. The German Command retaliated by shooting 300 civilians in a big cave known as Fosse Ardeatine. No way the partisans could predict such a harsh reaction. For decades the right-wing charged the GAP with cowardice and cynicism because they didn't give themselves up to the Germans and save the civilians. This is a shameful lie: the German Command did *not* announce the retaliation. On March 26, a communique appeared on the papers. Focus on the last six words: "[.] The German Command has decided to crush the activities of these wicked bandits. No-one will sabotage the re-established cooperation between Italy and Germany. The German command has ordered to shoot ten communist/badogliani criminals for any murdered German. The order has already been executed. [L'ordine e' gia' stato eseguito]". The Nazis called "communist" or "Badogliano" (after Marshall Pietro Badoglio, prime minister after the fall of Mussolini and the Armistice) anyone who wasn't a collaborationist. All kinds of people were murdered at the Ardeatine.
11- See footnote no.7
12- It is hardly believable that Vitaliano
mentioned the name of the victim while alluding to a political murder he
committed as a boy. Chiocci must have misunderstood, to say the least.
-----------
A final comment: Vitaliano warned the audience
about a return of "those who had raped and murdered" and "committed gruesome
crimes". The article's headline goes: "If the Pole wins.". Quite an interesting
lapse. Or should we assume that the Pole has raped, murdered and committed
gruesome crimes? ;-)
